AnandTech takes a look at the Intel iMac

I think the "core duo effect" is "blunted" on Mac OS X, compared to Windows, because OS X double-buffers all its windows. On Windows, when a window is uncovered, its application must become active and redraw the window. If your Windows box is busy, or if an application is using lots of memory, this can take a while, and it's very noticeable. Adding a second processor would help a lot with this, in a very noticeable way, making the machine look faster and more responsive.

On the Mac, the Window Server keeps a bitmap copy of every window's contents; when a window is uncovered or moves to the front, the Window Server just blasts that bitmap to the screen, which is far faster than switching to an application and executing the drawing functions to repaint the window. Blasting the window's buffer to the screen is quite fast, and highly optimized, so it was fast even on a 500 MHz iBook. It'd be hard to noticably improve on that, so there's no reason a core duo should improve it from "instantaneous" to "more instantaneous".

One thing that all the reviews of the new iMac have failed at is to add more memory. They are all reviewing a base 512M system when realistically most of the software and especially Rosetta wants more memory.

This is from Pg 6 of the review:

>It could be that the OS X scheduler just does a >better job, or it could be that the 512MB of memory >on these machines was enough of a bottleneck that I >couldn't really gauge the improvement in >responsiveness thanks to a dual core machine. My best >guess is that it is a combination of both. It's not >that you don't notice a benefit when moving to dual >core, it's just that the difference in responsiveness >isn't as great as what I was expecting. One other >potential reason is that the OS X interface in >general isn't particularly responsive, so it may just >be that the dual core effect is dulled thanks to a >slower UI (slower compared to Windows that is).

The question that comes to my mind is: When is Apple going to fix the Finder!!! In the OS9 era, the Finder was where Windows users were impressed. Now it looks nice, but is dog-slow. Sad.

That's a great point, I was just thinking that. Jobs has said time and again that the main reason for the switch was because they couldn't get a G5 into a PowerBook. So I would expect that the PowerBook Duo (a better name that 'MacBook Pro,' don't you think?) will blow the G4's out of the water.

I only wish I had about 2 grand to drop on a PowerBook Duo right now...

After weeks of debate about the speed improvements relating to the Intel Core Duo chips, I really feel like people are missing a salient point: the laptops will be "mind blowingly" faster. This is the equivalent to jamming a souped-up, next generation G5 into a Mac laptop, which used to be the holy grail of performance bumps, before the Intel shoe dropped.

So, am I looking forward to my MacBook Pro? You bet!